Like You, Phil Dunster Already Misses Jamie Tartt

It’s almost time to say goodbye to Ted Lasso. The fish-out-of-water tale about a clueless, but affable American football coach, who’s improbably hired to rescue an equally clueless but affable English football team from total reputational ruin—satiating millions during the bleak heights of a global pandemic with its digestible charms—is in what may end up as its third and final season. 

One of the Apple TV+ show’s central characters, Jamie Tartt, the preternatural midfielder—played by Phil Dunster to cocky, coiffed perfection—has been on a slow, uneven arc from antagonist to protagonist, fumbling his way through arrogance and insults, romantic advances-cum-rejections. In the show’s penultimate episode, “Mom City,” Tartt endures periods of complete emotional collapse.

I spoke with the 31-year-old Dunster minutes after we both watched the episode for the first time. He spoke glowingly of the heavily eyebrowed Brett Goldstein, both a writer on the show and the inimitable, retired footballer Roy Kent. Dunster also had kind words for co-star Juno Temple, who plays the woman Jamie wishes would take him back, and Jason Sudeikis, the titular, mustachioed Lasso and real-life Lasso showrunner.

“Mom City” finds Jamie home in Manchester, due to play against the team that booted him for taking an ill-advised stint on reality television, and in front of the terrorizing father he decked in the face the last time he saw him. Ahead of it all, Jamie can’t stop crying. He visits his mother before the match, settles into her arms, and asks how he’s supposed to play this sport he loves without it being merely a fuck-you to his father. Roy, seated next to him, can hardly believe his eyes or finish his pastry. Turns out, the little prick he loathed in the series pilot, the one who dated his love interest before he did, whose knees will always be younger and stronger and fitter, has been irrevocably softened by prolonged exposure to people who care for him, frosted tips and all. In this moment, Ted Lasso does what it’s always done best: revealing the tender heart thumping just below the surface.

What begins with a kind of sitcom-style silliness in the opening scenes of the episode—Jamie wailing to Roy about how he’s lost his wings and the ability to use conditioner in the shower—unfolds into something warmer, and deeper, with a touch of cinematic sports glory as he trods the final stretch of his me to we embarkment. Uncertainty, injury, suspense, elation! 

Dunster is joyous when he describes his years embodying Jamie as part of the Lasso ensemble. “[It’s] just this collective sense of accomplishment and gratitude,” he tells me. “What a wonderful thing to have been a part of—really, to be a part of.” The British actor is steadfast in his offscreen love of Goldstein, once a bitter foe for Jamie, now a begrudging friend. Themes that have swirled throughout all three seasons of Ted Lasso bubble cleanly to the surface in Episode 11: masculinity, identity, and the parental relationships that gut us open and bring us home. 

Dunster brims with pride as he discusses Jamie’s game-winning goal, one that’s a kind of summation of Jamie’s journey writ large: “It was a Jamie Season One kind of goal, that very self-assured way of I’m going to score now. But the difference is that this time we see the team celebrating with him, whereas in Season One he scores and goes, Me, me, me, me, me.” It’s clear there’s a deeper resonance to Jamie, for Dunster—to the whole thing for him, actually—the kind of care and tenderness and earnest appreciation that made Lasso a tear-jerking, global sensation to begin with. It’s comedy, born from pain and heart.

Leigh Keily

“I’ll miss just knowing this dude intimately and all of his choices,” Phil Dunster says of saying goodbye to Jamie Tartt. “It was a real gift.”